Market

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

"PARKS" FOR FOOD PRODUCTION AND PROCESSING-MALAYSIAN MODEL

It is remarkable that a small country like Malaysia is able to evolve a production and marketing system for agricultural food crops that is equitable to the growers as well as to the processors. The special purpose vehicle ( SPV) for developing agriculture in the form of food producing parks focuses more on organized and efficient production of the chosen range of food raw materials and to prevent glut in markets another SPV in the form of processing and packing center is being created within the food producing parks to take care of surplus raw produce and prevent price destabilization in the market.

"A food processing and packing centre will be build in each permanent food producing park (TKPM) to activate downstream activities. Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry Minister Datuk Seri Noh Omar said this would prevent dumping of agriculture produce from the 45 TKPM nationwide. "Dumping of agriculture produce will only defeat our purpose of creating successful entrepreneurs," he told reporters when visiting Lanchang TKPM near here Sunday. He said the centres would help farmers in processing agriculture produce like jackfruit, papaya, pineapple and banana. There are 889 TKPM entrepreneurs nationwide working some 7,000 hectares of agriculture areas since 2009".

What is needed in India is such a model where land is consolidated into a type of collective farm for pumping optimum inputs for raising the productivity to the highest level possible. There can be hundreds of such farms or parks involving thousands of well identified agricultural entrepreneurs, each specializing in one or two crops in areas found most suitable climatically. The classical example of the Maize farms being operated by the Tibetan refugees in Bylekuppe in Karnataka, covering about 5000 hectares of land allotted to them has demonstrated the soundness of this concept and if Karnataka is the leading producer of Maize in the country, credit is due to these Tibetan farming entrepreneurs. Probably such an approach as in Malaysia may be an option for India to organize small land holding farmers into a viable force to reckon with.